Users can subscribe to a service to receive location-sensitive content delivered to a mobile device, such as a mobile telephone or personal digital assistant. For example, based on such a subscription, every day, within a subscription period, whenever certain pre-defined conditions are satisfied, information is transmitted or pushed to the device of the user. For instance, a user or client might subscribe to a service (either via a mobile device, such as a mobile phone or electronic organizer, or from a computer), by visiting a web page of a content provider. The web page enables the user to subscribe to weather forecasts, for example, every day at 8 a.m. The content provider locates the client every morning at 8 a.m. and pushes location-specific content (e.g., a weather forecast at his current location) to his mobile device. Even if the user travels, the user gets weather forecasts for the current location of the user every morning.
For services such as the above to work, two levels of subscription are required, especially if the content provider and a mobile communications link provider (or service request processor) are different business entities. For example, consider the situation where a server that is external to a mobile communications provider (say a server that belongs to weather.com) is the one serving weather content. The client or user registers for the service with the external third party content provider for the location-specific information. Currently, the client would also have to register with the mobile phone service provider so that the mobile phone service provider is aware that the weather application from the third party (weather.com) is authorized to access the client's location information, for example, every day at 8 a.m. Only after both these registrations have been processed, can the daily service be successfully provided.
This scenario does not work with a single subscription. For example, if the client were to register only with the third part content provider, the mobile phone service provider has no easy means of authorizing the content provider. The mobile phone service cannot easily determine that the client did indeed request the subscription and wants the content provider to be provided the client's location information. This is important, for otherwise, a devious content provider might register a hundred end users as clients, and then subsequently sell their location information to unscrupulous third parties.
If, on the other hand, the client registered the subscription only with the mobile phone service provider, unless that subscription percolated down into the appropriate content provider server, the content provider would not commence serving the client. Such a percolation is only practical where the mobile phone service provider has knowledge of, and perhaps a prior business relationship with, the content provider. Therefore, in this case, the customer has lesser control on which content provider to pick to service a given content request. For example, if two content providers, such as, for example, weather.com and cnn.com/weather provide similar forecast pushing services, the mobile phone service provider might favor one over the other (say the first over the second). However, given the nature of the service the client is subscribing to, the client might actually prefer the latter, since the latter offers the client features that are of greater interest to him.
Having to manually provision for a service with two different service providers can be frustrating to clients. Therefore, there is a desire for a simple, efficient and scalable mechanism to transparently handle a two-step subscription process. Preferably, with such a mechanism, the content provider server and the communications service provider Request Processing Entity (RPE) mutually authenticate before an authorization step is performed. For example, the authenticated identity of the remote party or client is used in the authorization step to ensure that the remote party or client is indeed who they say they are. The RPE may be, for example an MPC (Mobile Positioning Center) in North American markets, or a GMLC (Gateway Mobile Location Center) for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Asia).